Books

30 March 2007

Don Bohning’s new history of covert operations against the regime of
Fidel Castro, is admirably conceived. Much of the literature about U.S.
policy toward Cuba in the 1960s is segmented and, consequently,
unbalanced. Authors interested in presidential and/or CIA debacles have
focused on the ill-fated Bay of Pigs expedition, often to the exclusion
of the rest of the story. Other writers, intent on showcasing John F.
Kennedy’s finest hour -- and one of the CIA’s -- have concentrated on
the Cuban missile crisis while attenuating the significance of what
transpired before and after. Meanwhile, the anti-climactic coda to this
sometimes comic story -- namely, U.S. policy following President
Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 -- is seldom, if ever, written
about. Bohning’s first contribution is that he tries to tell the story
whole, as it should be.

Bohning, a
journalist, brings interesting credentials. He began covering Latin
America for the Miami Herald in 1964, including the large Cuban
community in South Florida. This is a great advantage because so much
of the story is bound up with Cuban exiles. In 1962-63, the covert “station” in Miami (aka “JMWAVE”) was the largest CIA outpost in the
world, other than headquarters in Langley. According to Bohning,
JMWAVE’s budget ran as high as $50 million (in 1960s dollars), The
station controlled between 300 and 400 front companies at one time or
another, and up to 15,000 Cubans were connected to the covert war at
its height.

Some of Bohning’s best
insights come from interviews with several key CIA officers who worked
at the operational level -- i.e., where airy concepts and neat plans
met reality. The perspectives of Ted Shackley, the JMWAVE station chief
from 1962 to 1965, and Sam Halpern, an operations officer at CIA
headquarters who worked the Cuba account, make for a fascinating look
at “MONGOOSE,” a largely fruitless effort conducted from 1961 to 1962.
It was the first and last covert operation overseen by an attorney
general (Robert Kennedy), and probably the most ill-conceived
clandestine operation ever until the Iran-contra folly some 25 years
later.

Although Bohning is not the first author to track down Jake
Esterline and Jack Hawkins, the CIA project chief and chief of the
paramilitary staff respectively during the Bay of Pigs invasion, no one
has made better use of their recollections. Their bitterness over a
mission that was preordained to fail is palpable. If a person can ever
be held responsible for that debacle, it has to be Richard M. Bissell,
the deputy director for plans in 1961. The doctrine of “plausible
deniability” is not supposed to lead to a situation where a president
is kept unaware of the consequences of his decisions. Yet, on the basis
of his interviews with Esterline and Hawkins, Bohning makes a
convincing case that Bissell lied up and down the chain of command, as
if only he needed to know.

If Bohning’s
history has a flaw, it is in his larger depiction of certain events. He
gives short shrift to the primary reason why the Soviet Union implanted
missiles in Cuba. Nikita Khrushchev could have turned Cuba into an
island bristling with conventional weaponry if his main impulse was to
foil Operation MONGOOSE and/or prevent another invasion (which
Washington had no intention of mounting absent a good-size revolt).
Instead, the Soviet premier sought to redress, in one swift and
surreptitious deployment, a serious imbalance in the nuclear balance of
terror. And since the subtext of Bohning’s book is intelligence-agency
blunders, why not point out that the missile deployment represented a
monumental intelligence failure on Havana’s part (not to mention
Moscow’s)? Nothing before or since has put Castro’s revolution at such
risk.

Bohning also shies away from some
new interpretations he might have offered based on the evidence he
presents. Since the mid-1970s, for example, it has been a cliche to
speak of the Kennedys’ vendetta against Castro. But as new biographies
and histories have shown, President Kennedy, while reckless in some
aspects of his life, was anything but when it came to Cold War hot
spots such as Berlin and Cuba. He consistently tried to defuse, if not
avoid altogether, situations where the superpowers were pitted directly
against one another. JFK cannot be absolved of responsibility for what
was undertaken during his administration, but fixations do not seem to
have been his style. “Europeans think we are slightly demented on the
subject of Castro,” he commented, in a typically detached remark during
the missile crisis.

The obsession with Castro that Bohning writes of
radiated from Robert Kennedy, as one episode vividly illustrates.
According to Bohning’s interview with a Cuban exile prominent in the
CIA’s covert war, after the island had been quarantined, the attorney
general personally advised the exile to provoke an incident that might
spark a war. “[Y]ou Cubans, if you really want to help,” Kennedy
reportedly said, “what you have to do is get yourself a boat and try to
sink one of those Russian ships trying to break the blockade.”

At the time, of course, President Kennedy was doing everything in his
power to enforce the quarantine without provoking a confrontation.

The advance text of John F. Kennedy’s Trade Mart speech was generating, on the morning of November 22, 1963, more of a buzz in the press than usual, even among the jaded White House contingent. This was no boilerplate presidential address. The President was going to deliver it in Dallas, after all, the virtual capital of his right-wing opponents and the one large municipality that had chosen Nixon over Kennedy in 1960 and was predicted to favor Goldwater in 1964. Not coincidentally, Dallas was also a fount of anti-Communist paranoia and the wellspring for some of the ugliest anti-Kennedy bile in circulation. “We’re heading into nut country today,” the President told his wife that morning in Fort Worth, where she donned her pink suit. And the press knew it, half expecting, perhaps half hoping, that some newsworthy incident would occur during the motorcade en route to the Trade Mart. What better than a display of local venom to juxtapose against the President’s speech, which would pointedly criticize “voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality, wholly unsuited to the sixties”?

Thirty-five years later, because John Kennedy never delivered that speech, we have the following result: The October issue of George, edited by the President’s son, features an article by Oliver Stone. Although he strikes a vaguely leftish pose, Stone in fact uses the familiar rightist logic of those who mutter darkly about black helicopters, fluoridation of the water and one-world government, not to mention precious bodily fluids. Kennedy was “calling for radical change on several fronts--the USSR, Cuba, Vietnam,” writes Stone. “If nothing else, a motive for murder is evident.” Until this article in George, the Kennedy family had steadfastly refused to dignify conspiracy buffs. Now Kennedy fils lends respectability to one of the worst purveyors of the kind of paranoid nonsense eschewed by his father, vigorous anti-Communist though he was.

It is not just John junior who validates Stone, of course. A special feature of Film & History (Vol. 28, Nos. 1-2) devoted to Stone says this of the director:

In many respects, then, Stone is one of the most influential “historians” in America today.... In calling Stone a historian we are, of course, expanding upon the familiar definition.... In the modern age of film and video, producers and directors are acting historians, too, and their productions often make a significant impact on the public’s perceptions of history.

A subsequent article in the same issue speaks of how students may benefit from “evaluating specific pieces of conflicting evidence from the Warren Commission and Stone’s JFK.” [Emphasis added.] No one should dismiss for a moment Stone’s reach and influence, pernicious as it is, and surely Stone’s JFK deserves rigorous study in the classroom, for he is as emblematic of his age as Leni Riefenstahl was of hers. But Stone is no historian.

In seemingly stark contrast to this Wonderland, where words mean whatever people say they mean, stands Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a historian as predictable as an old shoe. Schlesinger uses words to convey commonly accepted meanings, except that he manipulates them as if he were a lifetime employee of the Kennedy White House, his eloquence in the writing of history rivaled only by his skill at dissembling it. Readers of Schlesinger’s 1978 biography of Robert Kennedy will be forgiven if they reach the last page not realizing that the attorney general forced out the one advocate, Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles, of a genuine alternative to arrogant and blinkered anti-Communism. With Bowles’s elimination, there was no one left in higher councils to argue that Cuba represented a thorn in the US flesh, not a dagger in its heart, and RFK was free to become the “wild man...out-CIAing the CIA.” One can almost set a clock by Schlesinger’s rebuttals. The latest, published in the December Cigar Aficionado, dismissively treats RFK’s central role in the post ­Bay of Pigs, government-wide obsession to overthrow Castro as not being the attorney general’s “finest hour.” The professor also trots out a very tired rogue elephant: There is no direct evidence that President Kennedy “authorized or knew of the assassination plots” (note the absence of Robert Kennedy’s name), and that the CIA’s involvement occurred because it “believed that it knew the requirements of national security better than transient elected officials, like presidents.”

Presidents frequently resort to blue-ribbon com­mis­sions to help them find a way through, or at least temporary shelter from, political storms. High-level commissions took on the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 surprise attacks, President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and any number of lesser crises, such as the Iran-contra scandal during President Ronald Reagan’s second term. Their reputation, however, is decidedly mixed. More than four decades after JFK’s murder, for example, the Warren Commission’s report remains the object of widespread ridicule. Yet such panels continue to appeal to presidents. Kenneth Kitts, an associate provost and political science professor at South Carolina’s Francis Marion University, sets out to explain why.

He focuses on five panels, all concerned with national security: the Roberts Commission on Pearl Harbor (1941–42); the Rockefeller Com­mis­sion on the CIA’s domestic activities (1975); the Scowcroft Commission on MX missile deployment (1983); the Tower Commission on Iran-contra (1986–87); and the 9/11 Commission (2002–04). Four of the five (the exception being the Scowcroft Commission) came into being in response to catastrophes or apparent scandals, and were ostensibly established to uncover what happened, who was to blame, and how recurrences might be avoided.

Kitts makes a solid attempt to draw back the curtain of mystery behind which these commissions typically operate. He rightly emphasizes the paramount importance of who is selected to serve on them, and provides many insights into the political intrigue behind the scenes. His sketches of the members of the Roberts Commission investigating Pearl Harbor—four military men and a Supreme Court justice—demonstrate that the panel was congenitally flawed. Major General Frank McCoy, for example, was compromised by his friendship with Secretary of War Henry Stimson; and the panel’s chairman, Justice Owen Roberts, was notable for an almost childlike naiveté.

Some of Kitts’s omissions are curious, though. For example, he notes that the Tower Com­mission on Iran-contra portrayed President Reagan as confused and out of the loop, a president who had allowed National Security Council aides to run amok and cross-wire two covert oper­ations (arms to Tehran in exchange for American hostages and cash, with the cash then diverted to the Nicaraguan contras). By contrast, two separate investigations, one by a joint congressional committee and another by independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, found that Reagan, in Kitts’s words, “had actively presided over an illegal and politically unsound policy.” Kitts seems inclined toward the latter explanation, though he brings no new information to bear either way. Could President Reagan’s Alzheim­er’s disease, unrecognized at the time, help account for the dis­parate accounts? Kitts doesn’t even mention the possibility.

The outlier here is the Scowcroft Commission, which came into being because President Reagan wanted blue-ribbon sanction for his plan to de­ploy a new land-based missile. Though com­missions are frequently convened to legit­imize pre-cooked decisions, Kitts would have been wise to dispense with this one and devote more of his relatively short book to mining the history of the other, more controversial panels.

Kitts concludes that in appointing these commissions, presidents tend to be concerned more with protecting their own interests than with ferreting out the facts. At the very least, commis­sions buy time until their reports come out and establish one axis for debate. That’s true enough, though congressional investigations—which Kitts generally takes at face value—are no less tainted by self-interest and political agendas. Still, and despite its limitations, Presidential Commissions & National Security succeeds in turning a spotlight on a phenomenon that deserves scrutiny: the efforts of temporary panels, their life spans measured in months, to investigate the permanent government and its failings.

Max Holland first established his credentials as a JFK assassination expert through his painstaking research into how conspiracy theorists had misled the public about the role the CIA and other intelligence agencies played in the assassination. He was also one of the first researchers to provide evidence which established that a Soviet disinformation campaign had been responsible in creating many myths about alleged US Government involvement in the death of JFK. Holland’s research concerning Soviet efforts in the dissemination of false information about CIA involvement in the assassination is bolstered by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin’s The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, which establishes the nature of KGB disinformation techniques in the USA during the 1960s and 1970s.

Holland’s research into New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s bogus investigation of the assassination has never been seriously challenged. Together with Patricia Lambert’s thorough examination of Garrison’s investigation (False Witness) Holland’s work has done much to demolish long-standing myths associated with the alleged New Orleans-based conspiracy to kill JFK. Through his excellent articles (in The Nation, Wilson Quarterly, The Atlantic and American Heritage) detailing how conspiracy theorists had skewered the truth about the assassination, Holland has provided the American public with an understanding of how and why conspiracy ideas captured the imagination of the American public for the past four decades. His research into the work of the Warren Commission also established how conspiracy theorists had wrongly concluded that Commission members deliberately sought to cover up the truth about the assassination. His forthcoming book about the Warren Commission is eagerly awaited.

It was therefore surprising to read a review of Max Holland’s new book , The Kennedy Assassination Tapes, that did not recognise the author’s previous contributions to the subject. I am always suspicious of anonymous reviews by newspapers and weeklies which cover subjects as complex as the JFK assassination. What credentials and authority do the reviewers possess and how much time have they spent researching the subject? With this in mind I read Publishers Weekly review of Max Holland’s book .

It should be clear to many JFK assassination researchers that Publishers Weekly has not understood the importance of Holland’s work and how it has advanced the knowledge and understanding of LBJ’s role in the events of November 22, 1963. The magazine’s writer maintains that “…much of Holland’s book is redundant with Michael Beschloss’s recent and better executed Taking Charge ….the bulk of the tapes in question…have for the most part, already been thoroughly digested, parsed and summarised…”

However, Publishers Weekly has misrepresented Holland’s contribution.The writer is obviously unaware of the author’s unique expertise in matching the contents of the tapes with his own erudition in the field of JFK assassination studies, an erudition that does not extend to most writers who previously used the LBJ presidential recordings. What differentiates Holland from previous writers is the way he combines his extensive knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the assassination and the subsequent government enquiries with his own work transcribing and interpretating the presidential recordings.

Although the books written by historians Michael Beschloss and Jeff Shesol (Mutual Contempt) have been rightly acclaimed they are, in part, flawed. Both writers have taken crucial assassination-related conversations out of context in their books Taking Charge and Mutual Contempt. Holland’s superior knowledge and intimate familiarity with the presidential recordings has allowed him to correct the record. This can be no better exemplified than in the way Holland provides the correct context to many of the statements LBJ made about the assassination, the Warren Commission investigation and the endless speculation that went on between 1963/69 about the possibility of a conspiracy to murder President Kennedy.

Holland correctly relates how LBJ’s oft-repeated assertions about a ‘JFK conspiracy’ have, over the years, led conspiracy advocates to lay claim to having ‘proof’ that a conspiracy existed. But Holland’s background knowledge of the assassination and also his knowledge of the way LBJ verbalised his thoughts is crucial. As he demonstrates, comments made by Senator Richard Russell to LBJ – ‘I don’t believe it’ – and LBJ’s reply ‘I don’t believe it either’ – have been misused by numerous writers to imply that both men rejected the conclusions of the Warren Commission investigation. However, as Holland correctly points out, both men were discussing the single-bullet theory, not the conclusions of the Warren Commission investigation. Holland also corrects previous interpretations by showing how both men’s rejection of the single-bullet theory was not based on considered judgements but simple opinion. At the time of the conversation in question both men had not been privy to the ballistics evidence which supported the theory. And LBJ’s manner of speaking, Holland states, his ‘well-known penchant to exaggerate and speak for effect’, has long been recognised by LBJ historians.

Furthermore, Holland, unlike Beschloss, puts the assassination-related conversations all in one volume together with his extensive added commentary. The result is a clearer understanding of what transpired when LBJ became embroiled in the conspiracy controversy and the related Warren investigation. Holland also takes the story to the waning days of LBJ’s presidency.

This excellent book quickly and decisively silences the conspiracy critics who believe that LBJ had a hand in the murder of his predecessor. And, whilst conceding that LBJ may have harboured fears that foreign involvement in the assassination was a clear possibility, Holland nevertheless presents LBJ’s musings in the correct context of Cold War realities and the fears the conflict engendered; fears that led LBJ into speculation about whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald had been acting alone. LBJ had been conflicted as to whether or not conspirators murdered JFK. However, he was never able to substantiate his suspicions beyond simple guesswork. In the end he merely speculated that Castro was likely to blame.

This book is by far the most lucid and compelling account of the role President Johnson played in the investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination. His book should be read not only by JFK assassination researchers but also future LBJ historians.

Mel Ayton is the author of The JFK Assassination: Dispelling the Myths & Challenging the Conspiracy Theorists (Woodfield, 2002); A Racial Crime: James Earl Ray and the Murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (ArcheBooks, 2005), and The Forgotten Terrorist: Sirhan Sirhan and the Murder of Senator Robert F. Kennedy (Potomac, 2007).

Max
Holland’s book is important for two key reasons. First, it increases
our understanding of the impact and legacy of one of the most searing
events of twentieth-century American history: the assassination of John
F. Kennedy. second, the book raises significant questions about
listening to and transcribing presidential tapes. Any scholarly
assessment of this book that fails to address these methodological
issues would be, at best, incomplete, or at worst, pointless.

Holland’s
work proves, in a level of detail never before possible, that Lyndon
Baines Johnson’s succession to the presidency on November 22,1963, was
the most traumatic in American history-more so than earlier
presidential assassinations (1865, 1881, and 1901) because television
permitted the American people and the world to become virtual
participants in the event. An American born in 1850 could, by age 51,
personally remember the assassinations of three presidents. But, by
1963, relatively few Americans could recall the shooting of William
McKinley and the elaborate protection of the president seemed to rule
out another assassination.

Fortunately for historians, beginning
on the evening of the day he took the presidential oath in Texas,
Lyndon Johnson recorded nearly all his telephone conversations. It is
almost impossible to communicate, in mere words, the degree to which
these tapes capture LBJ’s persona and leadership skills. Many
historians have tried, for example, to describe the legendary “Johnson
treatment.” But, Holland’s transcription of these tapes makes it
possible to be a virtual ear-witness to that phenomenon. The “treatment” could include flattery, guile, humor, appeals to
self-sacrifice and patriotism, deceit, arm-twisting, and intimidation,
but ultimately relied on LBJ’s instinctive understanding of human
nature. Johnson recognized that politics was first and foremost a
living network of human relationships. He embodied, a former aide
recalled, “the finest quality of a politician. It was a sense of the
direction of political power.. . . He did not merely content himself by
getting ahead of those forces. He mastered the art of directing them.”[1]

These
insights are hardly new: biographers Robert Dallek and Robert Caro have
plumbed the depths of Johnson’s character, and historian Michael
Beschloss has already transcribed and annotated many of the LBJ tapes.
Max Holland, however, makes a unique contribution by focusing
exclusively on the Johnson tapes relating to the JFK
assassination-demonstrating conclusively, and tragically, that LBJ was
never able to put behind him the terrible circumstances of his
accession to the presidency. Johnson’s inability to escape that legacy
began within hours of the deadly shots in Dallas. LBJ’s relationship
with Robert Kennedy-who had enjoyed unique status in his brother’s
administration-had been a festering sore since RFK had humiliated
Johnson by trying to reverse JFK’s decision to select the proud Texan
as his running mate in 1960. LBJ had faded into the background during
the Kennedy era, convinced that he did not have the respect of many JFK
intimates. A devastating joke circulating in Washington in the summer
of 1963, that eventually got back to Johnson himself, said it all: “Lyndon who?”

31 December 1999

The best antidote to paranoid speculation is truth in small, indisputable doses. Herein lies the great value of Reporting the Kennedy Assassination. All Americans sentient on Nov. 22, 1963, remember the instant they heard about the president’s assassination and the reporters fated to cover that story reacted no differently. But then professional news-gatherers, unlike most other Americans, had to subsume their shock, fear and disbelief and get to work. Four arduous days of indelible, incredible memories followed. This volume mostly records what has not been set down elsewhere: telling, eyewitness accounts by men and women trained to observe. They did not flinch or embellish then and steadfastly refuse to do so 33 years later, even though there is plenty of money to be made by exploiting a tragedy that still gnaws at the American psyche.

Several young reporters who covered that awful weekend went on to prominent jobs in American journalism, in some cases on the basis of their performance in the Dallas crucible: Dan Rather, Jim Lehrer, Robert McNeil, Ike Pappas and Bob Schieffer, to name a few. Aside from Pappas, however, none of these big talents attended the 1993 conference at Southern Methodist University upon which this book is based – indeed, literally transcribed.

But little is lost by their absence. The 60 or so reporters, editors, photographers and cameramen who did participate were all from local newspaper, radio and television outlets in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. And damned if they were going to be beaten by any of the 250 media outsiders who descended on Dallas in the wake of the assassination. Precisely because it was their town, Dallas reporters made themselves ubiquitous and keen observers of all the dramas that weekend: from the shots in Dealey Plaza and the painstaking search of the Texas School Book Depository, to the agonizing wait at a movie theater and finally, of course, the first live, nationally televised murder.

The one-day SMU conference evoked a number of fascinating vignettes and what-might-have-beens as the reporters remembered. Take the story of Mary Woodward Pillsworth, a society reporter for the Dallas Morning News. She had no reportorial role to play that day but dearly wanted to see Jacqueline Kennedy. She decided to watch the motorcade on her lunch hour and positioned herself on Elm Street just steps from the depository. That made her the closest media spectator to the president when the shots rang out. After she and her colleagues collected themselves, they headed back to the newsroom, whereupon long before the official announcement was made, Pillsworth insisted, “He’s dead. I know he’s dead, or else I hope he’s dead because his head’s blown open.” But front-page editors did not believe their society reporter – or perhaps just didn’t want to believe – until the official announcement.

While Pillsworth eventually wrote an exclusive eyewitness report for her paper on Friday afternoon, Bob Jackson, a photographer for the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald, felt he had just missed the picture of a lifetime. Jackson had been riding in a convertible assigned to the motorcade, about six cars behind the president’s limousine, when three rifle shots rang out. Jackson saw a rifle sticking out of a sixth-floor window of the depository and realized he could catch the assassin in the act. But then he remembered he had just started to reload his camera and still wasn’t finished. By the time his colleagues caught up with Jackson’s eye, the rifle was withdrawn. Two days later, Jackson was assigned to photograph the transfer of Oswald to the Dallas County Jail. He decided to focus on a spot where Oswald was likely to pass and was looking through the lens as the accused assassin approached. Milliseconds after Jack Ruby fired his revolver, Jackson fired his camera as planned- and captured the vigilante murder in one of the great spot pictures of all times – an a Pulitzer Prize to boot.

In the realm of what-might-have-been, Reporting the Kennedy Assassination, also shows how chance and circumstance influence history far more than the paranoid explanations so popular now in Hollywood. Darwin Payne, one of the book’s editors and a journalism professor at SMU, was the night policy reporter for the Dallas Times Herald in November 1963. Shortly after midnight on Sunday, Nov. 24, Payne received a call from a city desk editor. The CBS radio network was carrying a report (by Dan Rather) that Dallas police had in custody an eyewitness who could identity Oswald as the man who pulled the rifle trigger. What did Payne know about that? Nobody at police headquarters could confirm the story, so Payne reluctantly called Jesse Curry at his home at 1:30 in the morning. Exhausted and sound asleep, the police chief made little sense at first. But finally, Payne correctly surmised there was no basis to the Rather story.

More than a year later, with the publication of the Warren Report, Payne learned of his incidental impact on history. As threats to do Oswald bodily harm mounted through the night, Sheriff Bill Decker decided that it would be better to move the accused murderer surreptitiously. Decker attempted to call Curry to tell him that “we got to transfer [Oswald] tonight. We can’t wait.” But the telephone was constantly busy and operators finally advised Decker the line was out of order. In fact, the policy chief had taken his phone off the hook after Payne’s call, and Oswald’s rendezvous with Jack Ruby in a grimy police garage was the result.

There are poignant moments in the book too. Tony Zoppi, normally the entertainment columnist for the Dallas Morning News, was drafted into emergency duty like everyone else and told to get down to Parkland Hospital immediately. He made his way to the emergency dock, where he was promptly stopped by Secret Servicemen. But then an ambulance rolled up carrying a heavy bronze casket, so heavy that Zoppi’s help was enlisted and the same agents now waved him through the door. Zoppi then spontaneously did something that to this day he finds hard to explain. “As we’re rolling that casket into the hospital, I reached underneath it and I put my fingerprints as hard as I could on the bottom of that casket … I figured, well, he’s going to be in this casket and I want him to know that Tony Zoppi helped carry this casket in.”

If this volume has one major shortcoming, it is that the book – or rather the conference on which it was based – was all too brief. Each of the various panels was limited to only one hour, and that was not enough time.

Forty years ago, the best films and TV dramas took aim at the conformity and paranoia that gripped many Americans during the McCarthy era.

How many “Twilight Zone” parables illustrated that the most fearful human emotion is fear itself? Today, by contrast, Hollywood producers often choose to nourish the appetite for conspiracy, and Oliver Stone is invited to lecture about postwar history at American University. That’s why this book, albeit modest, is a worthwhile contribution to the literature on that tragic weekend. It tells us the way it was, and the way it wasn’t.

It’s been one long Christmas for historians of the cold war since it ended. Communist-bloc documents have been bursting out all over since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. First came Stasi files from East Germany; subsequently, as regimes collapsed, access to state and party archives in those countries became possible. Then, with the implosion of the Soviet state in August 1991, came the biggest prize of them all: the promise of “open access” to documentary records from the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the Defense and Foreign Ministries, the Kremlin, even the KGB.

Fundamental as well as titillating revelations aplenty have issued from a steady stream of documents. The Bulletin of the Washington-based Cold War International History Project, which functions as a clearinghouse for documentation, has grown in five years from a modest thirty-two pages to 400-plus pages in its latest incarnation. But Soviet archives have often been opened in an incomplete, haphazard or preferential manner, and even gaining access to previously opened materials can be a byzantine experience. Scholarly access has been granted or restricted, as Raymond Garthoff tells us in Diplomatic History, “to serve current political objectives [or sometimes] nothing more than venal considerations.”

“One Hell of a Gamble” has to be considered in this context. It would be easy enough to reinforce all the superlatives on the dust jacket, for the book contains raw, new riches from Soviet sources about the Havana-Moscow-Washington triangle from 1958 to 1964. Not Only are ministerial, Politburo, Communist Party and KGB records cited, but the authors had unprecedented access to records of the GRU, the intelligence service of the Soviet armed forces, which played a larger role in this history than anyone in the West ever knew. On these grounds alone “Gamble” qualifies as a “must-have” book on the “Caribbean crisis,” as the Soviets preferred to label it, reflecting Moscow’s claim that the real issue was not missiles in Cuba, but survival of a fraternal socialist state.

Yet a caveat seems necessary because of the complexities regarding access. Aleksandr Fursenko, by reputation a cautious historian who made no waves during the Soviet era, was not able to rummage through all the cited archives at will and decide firsthand what was important. Under such circumstances, he and co-author Naftali had an obligation – which they do not discharge – to describe precisely the terms and scope of their unprecedented, privileged access to the inner sanctum. Even casual readers, and “Gamble” is obviously calculated to reach a popular audience, are entitled to know if the book is solely the product of the authors’ selectivity and enterprise or if other factors intruded, as they did. Until access is transparent, the situation amounts to a continuation of the cold war by the only means available these days.

The centerpiece of the book is undoubtedly the Cuban missile crisis, and the meaning of the Soviet-sourced information will be debated by students of that clash for years to come. At least one controversy about the period leading up to the crisis, however, would seem settled for good. The notion that a ham-handed US policy alone drove Havana into Moscow’s embrace is hard to sustain after reading Fursenko and Naftali’s account. Fidel Castro was not a card-carrying Communist when his July 26th movement seized power in January 1959; the Cuban Communist Party considered him bourgeois and undisciplined. But the hard-liners on his side, like his brother Raúl and Che Guevara, never had anything less than a Marxist-Leninist revolution and a Moscow alliance as goals, and struggled to bend developments in that direction while Fidel vacillated. “There is no other road [to independence] but the construction of a socialist society and friendship with the socialist camp,” Guevara told Aleksandr Alekseev in October 1959, when the senior KGB operative arrived – unbeknown to the CIA – to establish contacts with the top levels of the Cuban leadership. With the 1954 overthrow of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala uppermost in mind, and via back channels and shell corporations, Raúl Castro immediately set out to obtain Communist-bloc help in bolstering the revolution, while simultaneously purging it of less than reliable elements. This zeal to remake Cuban society, combined with Fidel Castro’s will to power, determined Havana’s course to the point where, in August 1960, the KGB enthusiastically changed its code name for Cuba from YOUNTSIE (Youngsters) to AVANPOST (Bridgehead).

“Gamble” also makes a dramatic contribution to understanding US policy toward Moscow during the Kennedy Administration. President Kennedy wanted to finesse the views and participation of his foreign policy team. So he turned to his most trusted confidant – Attorney General Robert Kennedy – to establish a back channel to Premier Nikita Khrushchev, hoping and informal exchange of views would allow the two leaders to be more flexible than they could be otherwise. Existence of this confidential channel has been known at least since 1995, when former Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin published his memoirs. But no one has ever had access to the gist of the more than fifty meetings that occurred between Robert Kennedy and Georgi Bolshakov, nominally head of the Washington bureau of TASS, the Soviet press agency, but actually a GRU colonel. This back channel is a fine example of what McGeorge Bundy aptly called the “non-sharables,” the secret things the Kennedy brothers kept between themselves.

Ultimately, however, the narrative often seems driven by the next event about which there is a Soviet document. The temptation to toss out information from Soviet files rather than plumb its meaning is most evident in the chapter on Dallas. Given Lee Harvey Oswald’s sojourn in Minsk, the Soviet Union was mortified at the prospect of being blamed for the assassination of President Kennedy, and its propaganda organs worked overtime spewing out disinformation. At the same time, the assassination was a political Rorschach, and Moscow tried to make sense of the event by putting it in understandable, self-referential terms. Thus, according to KGB analysts, an anti-Soviet coup d’etat had in fact occurred, “organized by a circle of reactionary monopolists in league with pro-fascist groups of the US with objectives of strengthening the reactionary and aggressive aspects of US policy.” It’s one thing to convey what ruling circles in the Soviet Union thought about the assassination. But the authors make almost no effort to distance themselves from the tripe about an oil depletion allowance conspiracy, nor do they stop to consider the implications of an intelligence service so hidebound by ideology that it cannot report objectively about a critical event in the adversary’s camp.

Not coincidentally, access to new Soviet sources has its counterpart on the American side. Tangible evidence comes in the form of the latest volume in Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), a historical series initiated by President Lincoln during the Civil War. Beginning in the mid-1980s, FRUS volumes came under justified attack by diplomatic historians. The series is supposed to be the official documentary record of US foreign policy and activity. Yet despite ample public evidence to the contrary, new volumes were implying that covert action had played no role in US diplomacy vis-à-vis such countries as Iran in 1953 or Guatemala in 1954. In 1991 Congress stepped in and passed a statute requiring that FRUS volumes be thorough, accurate and reliable – which was another way of saying they had to include covert actions of major proportions.

Volume XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath, is an impressive step in this direction. The book painstakingly documents American decision-making over the removal of the missiles, the less heralded “bomber crisis” and the protracted negotiations that never reached any formal agreement ending the standoff. There was never a flat “no invasion” pledge, just a limited assurance by Washington full of loopholes. The active role of then-Director of Central Intelligence John McCone is documented, but the new US openness is truly on display when covert action against Castro’s rule resumes. Notwithstanding the Bay of Pigs debacle and the failure of Operation MONGOOSE, the Kennedy administration embarked on an “Integrated Program of Action toward Cuba” in June 1963. The covert program sought to make Cuba’s economy scream, circa 1963, and employed the full panoply of clandestine tools. President Kennedy apparently had no illusions about its chances of success, but it represented a domestic as much as a foreign policy – promulgated with the November 1964 election clearly in mind. The administration simply had to give the impression of “busyness in Cuba,” as McGeorge Bundy put it.

The FRUS volume also reveals at the highest level of government an unusual preoccupation in 1963 with the possibility of Castro’s death. Contingency planning, of course, is normal. But the number of references to Castro’s death indicates this line of thinking wasn’t all that wishful and is further circumstantial evidence that the assassination plots were yet another of the Kennedy brothers’ “non-sharables.”

It is instructive to contrast the mythology surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy with the public and scholarly attitudes toward Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor – the other “flashbulb” event that seared America’s collective memory. Like the assassination of Kennedy, the surprise attack was the subject of an executive branch investigation followed by congressional hearings. As with the assassination, explanations based on conspiracy have dogged the official story about Pearl Harbor. (The latest accusation surfaced only three years ago.)

But distortions of the record and questionable logic have always helped relegate Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories to the political fringes; the official story remains intact. The phenomena surrounding the JFK assassination could not present a starker contrast. There the passage of time has only heightened public disbelief in the official account of the assassination, commonly known as the Warren Report. After the Warren Commission published its findings in September 1964, a Gallup poll indicated that 56 percent of Americans believed the report’s main finding: that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, was President Kennedy’s assassin. Today, however, approximately 90 percent of the public believes there was some kind of conspiracy to kill JFK.

This figure includes some who toil in the halls of academe. Among the plethora of new offerings on the 30th anniversary of the assassination is Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, by Peter Dale Scott, an English professor at the University of California at Berkeley. In one sense, there is nothing remarkable about this work. Indeed, its outstanding characteristics put it squarely in the tradition of most books about the assassination. Deep Politics is an unreadable compendium of “may haves” and “might haves,” non-sequiturs, and McCarthy-style innuendo, with enough documentation to satisfy any paranoid. The assassination, Scott writes (in typically opaque prose), was “the product of ongoing relationships and processes within the deep American political process.” What is this deep process? A virtual political Disneyland: the CIA, drug dealers, Somoza, Fred Hampton, COINTELPRO, Oliver North. And that’s just from two pages.

The manuscript apparently went unpublished for years, and one is mightily tempted to say that it should have remained so. Astoundingly, though, the book won the majority approval of the 20 professors, including four historians, who served on the University of California’s editorial committee in 1991-92.

To understand the JFK phenomenon, it helps to revisit the classic lecture “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” delivered at Oxford 30 years ago by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter (and published in a book of essays by the same title in 1965). The most prominent qualities of the paranoid style, according to Hostadter, are “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” Propagators don’t see conspiracies or plots here and there in history; they regard “a ‘vast’ or ‘gigantic’ conspiracy as the motive force in historical events.”

To be sure, as Hofstadter noted, the paranoid style isn’t unique to America. Witness Germany under Hitler or the Soviet Union under Stalin, where it actually came to power. But it is an old and recurring mode of expression in American public life, as evinced by the anti-Masonic movement in the 1820s, the anti-Catholicism of the 1850s, Populists’ claims about an international banking conspiracy in the 1900s, and Senator Joe McCarthy’s “immense conspiracy” of the 1950s. Purveyors often feel threatened by sweeping change, whether it be waves of new immigrants or a revolution in the economic order. At other times, they articulate an acute sense of dispossession, such as that felt by the far Right from the 1930s into the early 1950s.

Although the Kennedy conspiracy choir has some voices on the Right, the great preponderance of books (450 since 1963) and articles (tens of thousands) have been written from the liberal/left perspective. Factual disputes have much less to do with this than one might think. “Catastrophe . . . . is more likely to elicit the syndrome of paranoid rhetoric,” Hofstadter wrote. And putting aside venal reasons, clearly the liberal/left outpouring is related to its sense of political dispossession since 1963. (Democrats were out of power for 20 of the next 30 years.) Indeed, every wrong in America is considered traceable to the presidency that was aborted and the future that died on November 22, 1963.

Still, what is markedly different about this phenomenon from previous manifestations of paranoia is that the distrust is so deep and pervasive. Glancing through Who Shot JFK? one can find a conspiracy theory for practically every contingency and political belief: The Mafia did it; Robert Kennedy did; Jackie was upset because her husband had extramarital affairs, so she did it. The KGB, Cubans (both anti- and pro-Castro), the CIA and/or FBI, right-wing Texas oilmen, tsarist Russians, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun – and on the zany list goes. The “friendly fire” theory holds that a Secret Service agent riding in the limousine behind JFK fired the fatal shots, by accident. And apparently the latest trend among conspiracy theorists is to bash one another for believing in the wrong conspiracy.

Commentators usually ascribe the public’s paranoia to the disturbing events that followed Kennedy’s murder: Vietnam, other assassinations, Watergate, exposure of FBI and CIA abuses in the 1970s, and finally the Iran-contra scandal, all of which undermined Americans’ trust in their elected government. But a more complicated argument can be made. The assassination and its aftermath have never been firmly integrated into their place and time, largely because of Cold War exigencies. Consequently, Americans have neither fully understood nor come to grips with the past.

But the assassination is very much a part of the Cold War, an unintended consequence of U.S. Policies. And once bolted down, it ceases to be unfathomable and becomes another defining post-World War II event, as much as Vietnam or the Cuban missile crisis.

In a letter to The New York Times last year, William Manchester, author of The Death of a President, identified the key source of the public’s incomprehension:

To employ what may seem an odd metaphor, there is an aesthetic principle here. If you put six million dead Jews on one side of a scale and one of the other side put the Nazi regime – the greatest gang of criminals ever to seize control of a modern state – you have a rough balance: greatest crime, greatest criminals.

But if you put the murdered president of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn’t balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the president’s death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for something.

A conspiracy would, of course, do the job nicely.

Actually, though, Oswald carries more weight than Americans have dared admit to themselves. As the Warren Report showed and Gerald Posner, a former Wall Street lawyer, reiterates in Case Closed, Oswald was a highly politicized Marxist sociopath. Disappointed with Soviet-style communism, he returned to the United States in June 1962 and began to see Cuba as the purest embodiment of communist ideology, the only truly revolutionary state. In New Orleans, he started his own “Fair Play for Cuba” chapter and walked the streets with a “Viva Fidel” placard.

Oswald, who fervently read left-wing periodicals and monitored Radio Havana, was acutely aware of the depth and nature of U.S. hostility toward Cuba. In all likelihood, he believed the worst rumors of U.S. attempts to overthrow – even assassinate – Castro, information that was later kept from the Warren Commission. After leaving New Orleans, Oswald tried to obtain a visa to Cuba to enlist in the country’s defense. But the Cuban embassy failed to see him as a “friend of Cuba,” and he returned to Dallas, embittered.

A month later, Kennedy came to town. The opportunity to subject Kennedy to the same dangers plaguing Castro presented itself. As Posner writes, Oswald, who had failed at almost everything he tried, “was suddenly faced with the possibility of having a much greater impact on history.” Jack Ruby was equally emotional, violent, and opportunistic, though not political.

Because of the Cold War, the CIA and FBI did not inform the Warren Commission about the covert operations to remove Castro. Such information, the agencies reasoned, would not contradict the central conclusion and therefore could be, and was, kept secret. Consequently, the Warren Report depicted Oswald as acting upon inchoate feelings (compounded by marital troubles) but without acute political motives.

Twelve years later, however, Senator Frank Church’s select committee on intelligence revealed the extent of anti-Castro plotting and the fact that the CIA and FBI had lied by omission to another arm of government. This shattered whatever trust remained in the official story and ripped the lid off a Pandora’s box of conspiracy theories. A slightly amended version of the official story should have become the new dogma by the late 1970s: The Kennedys’ fixation with Castro had inadvertently motivated a political sociopath. Instead, the disturbing truths were again obfuscated by Cold War exigencies, and by Kennedy partisans, who tried to disavow JFK and RFK’s knowledge of the plots.

The 30th anniversary of the assassination, especially since it coincided with the end of the Cold War, should have been marked by attempts to integrate the assassination into history. Of all the offerings, Posner’s Case Closed would seem the most suitable. But though Posner exhaustively debunks every canard proposed to date about the assassination, he largely ignored the contextual history of Oswald’s act and provides little more insight than the Warren Commission did as to why Kennedy became Oswald’s target. In addition, Posner’s stamina fails him when he writes about events after 1964, and the aftermath is almost as important in understanding the assassination as the act itself. (In his new biography, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, Richard Reeves doesn’t shrink from depicting Kennedy as a Cold Warrior, intend on overthrowing Castro. Yet he fails to draw any connections to the assassination; indeed, Oswald is not even mentioned in the book.)

So long as it lacks historical coherence, the official story will probably never be believed, and Americans will continue to ask questions based on cunningly manufactured falsehoods. To be sure, every nation is sustained by its own myths, which occasionally collide with reality. But when myths are as divorced from reality as these are, they become dangerous. Americans are encouraged to feel nostalgia for a past that ever was, wax dreamily about what might have been, or indulge in elaborate paranoid fantasies about their own government. Such states of mind hardly conduce to a rational consideration of America’s role in a new world.

11 December 1999

Every author dreams about good timing, some stroke of luck that will distance his book from the pack of 50,000 titles published annually in the United States. During the seven years he worked on The Prize, Daniel Yergin may have imagined some sort of crisis in the oil-rich Middle East that would make his book a hot property when it was published. But even in his wildest reverie, Yergin could not have dreamed that publication of his oil saga would coincide with the greatest American military expedition since the Vietnam War.

But coincide it did. Five days after Yergin delivered his epilogue to Simon & Schuster, Saddam Hussein’s troops invaded Kuwait. The publisher immediately embarked on a crash publishing schedule. In four months, or one-third the time it normally takes to publish a book, The Prize was in bookstores.

Critics of the war have pointed to a base motive behind American policy ever since George Bush uttered the words, “This will not stand.” If Kuwait exported, say, artichokes instead of oil, the United States would have cared considerably less about the fate of the emirate. But readers of The Prize will recognize an enduring principle at stake. In our century, oil begets national wealth, which begets state power. Americans differed over whether the resort to force was premature or wise. But unless one had been a pacifist or considered Saddam Hussein a benign force, the case for doing nothing would have been hard to make. American inaction would have been as grievous a miscalculation as was its involvement in Vietnam. A nation’s foreign policy is, after all, a matter of making distinctions.

But no one should conclude that Yergin’s book lets the United States off the hook. Many of the loudest advocates of force had earliest dismissed the criticism, popular in the mid-1970s, that indiscriminate arms sales in the Persian Gulf would eventually come to haunt America. Yergin also reminds us that, even as US forces battled in the Middle East, Americans were consuming far more gasoline per capita, and paying far less for the privilege of doing so, than anyone else in the world.

Yergin, the author of Shattered Peace (1977) and Energy Future (1982), here sets himself his most ambitious task to date: nothing less than a history of petroleum, and all that oil has achieved and despoiled since its modern discovery in the Pennsylvania hills. The word modern is significant because black ooze seeping up through the ground has been used since at least 3000 B.C., mostly as a medical nostrum. But the Industrial Revolution found new and ever more uses for petroleum – beginning with artificial lighting – until oil has become the key ingredient that makes modern society work.

At the outset, Yergin announces the three themes that he will explore in The Prize. These are the ways petroleum has been perceived in this century: first as a business, then as a strategic resource, and finally as a factor affecting the environment.

Oil became a big business and fortunes were made almost from the day that first Pennsylvania well hit pay dirt in 1859. Speculators in one early well earned $15,000 in profit for every dollar they invested. By the 20th century oil had become the world’s biggest business, virtually inextricable from modern capitalism, multinational enterprise, the international economy, and business-government relations. Seven of today’s top 20 Fortune 500 companies are oil conglomerates.

World War I, with its new petroleum-powered fleets and tanks, transformed oil from merely a commodity that generated immense wealth into an essential resource for nation-states. A young Winston Churchill was among the first to realize that strategic mastery itself was the prize conferred by control over oil. Churchill’s insight sounds the second theme of The Prize, in which Yergin correlates national power with control of oil resources. Oil-rich Iraq seems to prove this proposition: With a population of only 17 million, Iraq was able to support the fourth largest military force in the world. Yergin also reminds the reader how much American power is oil power. After World War II, in crises extending from the Korean War to the Six Day War in 1967, America’s capacity to maintain its oil supply through international production and its ability to guarantee the international transport of oil to its allies played a major role in cementing the Western alliance under US leadership.

Yergin makes this argument correlating oil and power persuasive, perhaps too persuasive, because he fails to treat what seem significant exceptions. His thesis does not explain, for example, why the Soviet Union, the world’s largest oil-producing country, has failed economically, or why Germany and Japan were able to become great powers without oil resources. (It can be argued of Japan and Germany, however, that their defeat in World War II was in no small part due to oil shortages).

The struggle for control of oil has created, paradoxically, an environment out of control: The follies and shortsightedness of Hydrocarbon Man is Yergin’s final theme. From global warming to the pollution and congestion in cities from Mexico City to Eastern Europe, oil has contributed to conditions of life that threaten human health, endanger other species, and possibly imperil the planet. Yergin’s look at the high-energy way of life is, in many respects, the most sobering aspect of the entire book. What emerges, after putting aside all the struggles for individual, corporate, or national wealth and power, is an unflattering picture of human incapacity to manage a non-renewable resource with even a modicum of enlightenment.

With such themes, and cast of characters ranging from John D. Rockefeller to the shah of Iran, Yergin could hardly have produced a dry, lifeless book. Yet for all its detail, The Prize leaves several important threads dangling, never fully exploring what the oil saga tells us about the business-state relationships, or the mix of oil money with politics. It is only after 100 pages of discussion that the reader is informed, almost incidentally, that John D. Rockefeller’s great success as an oilman depended in no small part on Standard Oil’s ability to pass and block legislation.

Yergin’s narrative becomes more politically oriented when it comes to the Depression. He shows why the Roosevelt administration agreed to ration production and keep oil prices at or above $1 per barrel during the 1930s. Grateful oilmen responded by becoming the only major industrialists to back the Democrats. Even if, eventually, more dollars from oil flowed to the Republican Party, the Democrats continued to receive competitive contributions. (Certainly virtually no other industry was as generous to the Democratic Party in the period from the 1930s to the ‘60s.) Oklahoma and Texas campaign contributions were a financial pillar of the New Deal coalition. They made the infamous oil-depletion allowance politically invincible. Yet even here Yergin expends more words on petroleum’s contribution to the rise of the motel than in explaining this stunning tax break.

Even when Yergin seems ready to get down to business, he often drops the ball. He devotes deserved space to one of the most revealing episodes in the entire post-war era: that struggle which began in 1951 when Iran’s new prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, nationalized British oil holdings. After a British-imposed embargo failed to deter Mossadegh, the US Central Intelligence Agency sponsored a coup in 1953 that overthrew him and placed the shah in power. The previous year, when Truman had sent Averell Harriman to negotiate with Mossadegh, the prime minister had claimed he could not compromise because of the power of Ayatollah Seyed Kashani. Harriman had then sought out Kashani, only to be told – in words that anticipate a later ayatollah – that all foreigners were evil, and foreigners interested in oil were candidates for butchering. Yergin fails to do justice to the lawyer and democrat Mossadegh, who quite legitimately wanted Iran to have control of its own resources. Mossadegh is portrayed here as something of an unreliable clown, irrational in his obstinacy.

The ramifications of Mossadegh’s defeat still resound today. The coup, its supporters say, brought 25 years of stability in Iran and provided America a key ally in the Cold War. But others note the irony with which this episode has come full circle: American opposition to Mossadegh ushered in the regime of the shah; internal Iranian opposition to the shah eventually brought about the theocracy of the Ayatollah Khomeini. The United States, to oppose Kohomeini’s Iran, supported and built up Saddam Hussein during the 1980s – and the rest is history. Ironies and tragic elements abound in the all-too-human struggle over petroleum and all it confers, but too often they are missing from Yergin’s account.

Some early readers criticized The Prize, feeling that Yergin had ascribed too much significance to oil, inflating its importance in events big and small. In fact, his opus omits too much of the real history. One is left with the sense that, while The Prize sketches the outlines of the complex tale, neither Yergin nor anyone else has completely mastered this epic drama.

07 December 1999

Move over, Michael Milken and Drexel, Lambert. In The Money Machine, author Sarah Bartlett nominates a serious rival for their dubious reputations. The financiers who epitomize the excesses of the 1980s, Bartlett convincingly argues, are actually named Henry Kravis and George Roberts, from the firm of Kohlberg, Kravis & Roberts (KKR).

In less than a decade, Kravis and Roberts parlayed a financing technique known as the leveraged buyout into one of the largest corporate empires in the world. They did it by weaving a web of greed, deceit, and conflict of interest that stretched from Wall Street to Washington, and all the way to Oregon. Their web attracted several of the nation’s biggest banks, insurance companies, pension funds and a dozen esteemed investment houses and law firms along with scores of CEOs. What’s more, every deal engineered by KKR was legal, or has stood up in court when tested. And that, Bartlett contends, is what finally makes Kravis and Roberts more characteristic of the era than Milken. The 1980s were not about illegality on Wall Street, although there was plenty of that. First and foremost it was about the stunning lack of business ethics by America’s best and brightest while they flipped corporations like hamburgers.

By zeroing in on KKR, Bartlett clearly aims to follow in the footsteps of such influential (and successful) books as Connie Bruck’s The Predator’s Ball and Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar. Bruck was the first to expose the inner workings of Milken’s Drexel, and Burrough and Helyar took readers on a financial roller-coaster ride by recreating the biggest deal of them all, the leveraging of RJR/Nabisco. Not coincidentally, the winner of that deal was KKR, making a book about this particular buyout boutique overdue.

Bartlett, a financial reporter for The New York Times, advances our understanding of the 1980s by showing how KKR raised the huge pools of capital necessary to leverage corporate America. When state pension funds arrived on the investment markets in the 1970s, they were hailed as a stable source of capital for the revitalization of the economy, their arrival serendipitous because Americans’ savings rate was declining. Bartlett shows how KKR’s buyout artists wooed and dined pension fund managers who controlled hundreds of millions of dollars, and how KKR contributed thousands of dollars to influence obscure, but pivotal, state races. A manager who helped KKR tap into public pension funds, such as Roger Meier, chairman of the Oregon Investment Council, was amply rewarded. Meier funneled a cool $500 million KKR’s way by the mid-1980s, and in return KKR handed him seats on the board of companies it acquired like so many $15,000 trinkets. Later, in what can only be interpreted as a quid pro quo for putting KKR on the map, Meier was even permitted to become an investor in certain deals from KKR’s portfolio.

This pattern of corruption by inclusion marked many of KKR’s relationships, and goes a long way toward explaining why KKR became a financial juggernaut and the most imitated firm on Wall Street in the 1980s. Longstanding pillars of that elite community, such as the venerable law firm of Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett, home to former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, even proved vulnerable to KKR’s calculated largesse. With KKR generating enormous fees for Simpson Thacher, the law firm allowed partner Richard Beattie, a prominent Democrat who handled the KKR account, to invest in his client’s deals. Again, this was nothing illegal. It only violated a longstanding ethical notion that lawyers should not invest in their clients’ businesses. Although Bartlett did not make the connection, with liberals like Richard Beattie it’s no wonder the Democratic Party is in shambles. Beattie, who was general counsel of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare under Joseph Califano during the Carter Administration, has pulled the laboring oar for the most virulently anti-union, anti-worker phenomenon on Wall Street in recent history.

Despite her considerable achievement in exposing KKR’s means of ascent, Bartlett’s book has serious flaws and omissions. The Money Machine strives for an intimate tone and ends up long on gossip and short on substance. Admittedly, much of the personal information goes to the heart of “Henry’s” and “George’s” lack of character and the sources of their ambition (the book annoyingly refers to Kravis and Roberts by their first names). Yet something is out of kilter when the manipulation of the corporate tax code, which makes or breaks so many deals, is referred to only in passing, while paragraphs are spent on the sexual preferences of Kravis’s elder brother. It’s as if the book were written by a reporter from People magazine rather than one of the chief financial journalists for the Times.

Even more regrettable is Bartlett’s apparent failure to investigate what happened at some or any of the scores of companies that were subject to KKR’s financial engineering. After all, if this is a story about two arrogant financiers who became conspicuously rich, why bother? Bartlett approvingly cites one critic towards the end of the book: “Acquisitions of companies are . . . serious matters. They are economic events that affect the lives and fortunes of investors, employees, suppliers, and customers.” A Wall Street Journal reporter just won a Pulitzer prize for revealing the dark side of KKR’s Safeway buyout. Bartlett sheds no additional light on this decisive question, however, aside from referring to a few deals that have gone sour from the investors’ point of view. This reportorial lapse is an inexplicable omission, especially given that Bartlett castigates colleagues in the financial press for being intimidated or suckered by KKR.

Bartlett’s instincts were sound as could be. But the book on KKR, and Wall Street speculation in the 1980s, still waits to be written.

In a 1992 letter to The New York Times, William Manchester put his finger on why the Kennedy assassination continues to fascinate and puzzle us. It may seem odd, Manchester wrote, but there is an aesthetic principle at root. Put “the murdered President of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, [and] it doesn’t balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the President’s death with meaning . . . ”

In his 26th book Norman Mailer accepts – no – embraces the aesthetic challenge Manchester identified. It is a challenge, interestingly enough, that Manchester (along with the Warren Commission) had no small part in creating. Rereading The Death of a President almost 30 years after its publication, one is struck by the author’s palpable, barely suppressed fury at Lee Harvey Oswald for killing the most powerful man in the world and robbing Manchester’s generation of its first president. The assassin is beneath contempt, a callow nonentity with a mail-order rifle. Could even the most talented writer rescue Oswald from this fate and give this killer back his humanity?

Mailer and his collaborator, Lawrence Schiller, did just that for Gary Gilmore 16 years ago in The Executioner’s Song. But the task here is even more difficult, given the layers of cant and crud that have accumulated over 30 years. The best part of Oswald’s Tale, covering the 2½ years he spent in Russia (1959-1962), recalls the movie Citizen Kane, for the approaches are similar. Like Welles, Mailer cleanses his subject by refusing to adopt an authoritative narrative; the account is an exploration rather than a solution, and the posture works brilliantly. Mailer painstakingly draws upon may voices and sources – interviews with friends and family, KGB reports on this strange American, diplomatic cables, and Oswald’s self-described “historic” diary – to assemble a compelling mosaic. No one of these rough, sometimes irregular pieces presents Oswald in the round, but the accumulated effort, when one draws back, is stunning. Perhaps it is an illusion shared by the writer and reader, but Oswald does begin to be comprehensible, a tragic rather than absurd figure.

Mailer/Schiller spent six months in Moscow and Minsk gathering information and impressions; it was what Mailer calls “the equivalent of an Oklahoma land-grab for an author.” They were armed with a promise from the Belorussian KGB that it would open its files on Oswald in Minsk, and although the materials were less comprehensive than promised (or imagined?), they enabled Mailer to reconstruct an important and largely undocumented part of Oswald’s life. Oswald lived in a bell jar, and before the state security organs decided that he was boring, no movement, conversation, or contact was too insignificant to be recorded by the KGB – literally. Observation reports and tape recordings of Mariana and Lee are used sparingly but to great effect. The end of the Cold War also meant that the Oswalds’ Russian and Belorussian acquaintances were free to talk about the defector in their midst, and these testimonies are persuasive more than 30 years after the KGB warned friends, former lovers, and enemies alike to keep their mouths shut.

Shortly after Oswald leaves Minsk, however, the book begins to falter. So much so that one is tempted to believe that the author’s original conception was Oswald in Minsk rather than Oswald’s Tale, and that Mailer began the project fully expecting the Soviet archives to reveal that Oswald was working for a secret agency (CIA or KGB). But Mailer became utterly convinced that no one sent Oswald to spy on Russia, and that the KGB had no interest whatsoever in recruiting him once he arrived uninvited. The only secret power center Oswald worked for was the one “in the privacy of his own mind,” Mailer writes.

Conceptions often must be altered in midstream, of course, and Mailer musters a good argument for forging ahead. He likens the chapters on Moscow and Minsk to a base camp, from which he will launch an assault on the “greatest mountain of mystery in the 20th century.” Yet that expedition proves to be nothing more than a running, occasionally amusing or interesting, commentary on testimony excised from the exhaustive Warren Commission hearings – some of which is reprinted – along with so many excerpts from Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s 1977 biography, Marina and Lee, that she deserves a royalty cut. There is, literally, nothing new here.

To Mailer’s credit, he cast aside his initial prejudices and wrote a work that concludes, albeit grudgingly, that Oswald “had the character to kill Kennedy, and that he probably did it alone.” This was not virgin territory, after all, for Mailer. He has publicly praised different conspiracy theories for years, and Oliver Stone in particular for supposedly driving out nonsense (“the mind-stultifying myth of the lone assassin”) with superior nonsense. Yet ultimately Mailer lacks the guts to say what needs to be said besides the fact that Oswald was the assassin: The Warren Commission got it right.

05 December 1999

In 1898, Adolphus Green, chairman of the National Biscuit
Company, found himself faced with the task of choosing a trademark for
his newly formed baking concern. Green was a progressive businessman.
He refused to employ child labor, even though it was then a common
practice, and he offered his bakery employees the option to buy stock
at a discount. Green therefore thought that his trademark should
symbolize Nabisco’s fundamental business values, “not merely to make
dividends for the stockholders of his company, but to enhance the
general prosperity and the moral sentiment of the United States.”
Eventually he decided that a cross with two bars and an oval – a
medieval symbol representing the triumph of the moral and spiritual
over the base and material – should grace the package of every Nabisco
product.

If they had wracked their brains for months, Bryan
Burrough and John Helyar could not have come up with a more ironic
metaphor for their book. The fall of Nabisco, and its corporate partner
R.J. Reynolds, is nothing less than the exact opposite of Green’s
business credo, a compelling tale of corporate and Wall Street greed
featuring RJR Nabisco officers who first steal shareholders blind and
then justify their epic displays of avarice by claiming to maximize
shareholder value.

The event which made the RJR Nabisco story worth telling
was the 1988 leveraged buyout (LBO) of the mammoth tobacco and food
conglomerate, then the 19th-largest industrial corporation in America.
Battles for corporate control were common during the loosely regulated
1980s, and the LBO was just one method for capturing the equity of a
corporation. (In a typical LBO, a small group of top management and
investment bankers put 10 percent down and finance the rest of their
purchase through high-interest loans or bonds. If the leveraged,
privately-owned corporation survives, the investors, which they can
re-sell public shares, reach the so-called “pot of gold”; but if the
corporation cannot service its debt, everything is at risk, because the
collateral is the corporation itself.